ADSL Bonding... About to move house to a 1Mbit area...

Hi,
I'm about to move house next month to a area that is just on the cusp of being classed as a rural area. However, It's about 2km away from an exchange that has fibre at the cabnet, however, fibre isn't available in the property. (One street down it is available?? Go figure? No sure what that means).

Anyway, I asked a friend who coincidentally lives in the next property to the house to run a speed test.

This is the results: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3083705237

This really alarms me. I'm using to having at least a stable 10mbit so I'm looking at my options. I think that I will look towards residential line bonding for ADSL but the prices are exhorbitantly higher than I would expect. I'd happily pay for the additional lines and additional broadband, but it appears as they the companies I've checked add an additionall 300% markup.


Can you recommend any reasonable providers? Ideally, I'd like to keep the cost to aroun £80 at the most per month for everything.

What are my options available to me?

Pity you can't get his line stats, or a peek inside his master socket.

Who's his ISP?

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 12-Nov-13 00:42:49)

BT?

Could be a bad line, poor cabling in the house or just a long line.

What does the wholesale address checker say if you look up the property?

Yep BT.

I think I will have to wait to move in before I do any actual diagnostics.

For the general postcode, the wholesale checker says:

WBC ADSL 2+ Up to 2.5 -- 1 to 4 Available
ADSL Max Up to 2 -- 1 to 3.5 Available
WBC Fixed Rate 1 -- -- Available
Fixed Rate 1 -- -- Available

However, also, if I check more accurately for the address it says:

BT BROADBAND AVAILABILITY CHECKER
Address XXXXXXXX, MAIDENCOMBE, TORQUAY, TQ1 XXXX on Exchange ST MARYCHURCH is served by Cabinet 30

Does the served by cabinet 30 mean that it supports fibre? Because that cabinet I believe has been fibre enabled.

The served by just means that is the cab you connect to. The checker suggests that cab does not have fibre. Speeds not looking great there but you may with a following wind get towards the top end.

I've been researching and I think this looks like a good option:

Buy 3 bonded lines: http://www.sharedband.com/solutions/service-pricing/
Will obviously need 3x ADSL+phone lines too. But should be able to do it maybe for about £80-90 a month. That should at least give 3-5Mbit.

I was just typing a reply but you beat me to it. I'll leave the sharedband bit in anyway...

You could look at Shareband which would work out at an additional £24 a month for two lines and 250GB usage. You would also have to buy a couple of their routers (£117.60 for the cheapest)
They recommend �high quality� broadband. No traffic management.
I believe this is the technology that Eclipse use for their bonding.

I have also seen that Xilo offer bonding but not sure what they charge for this service.
Taking them as an example using 21CN based connections maybe:

SOHO 100GB x2 £35.98
Line rental x2 £22.44 (Zen as they seem popular at the moment)

This leaves £21.58 to fit into your budget. Maybe drop then a question to see what they charge.

The cabinet is listed ALWAYS

If WBC FTTC is missing then the cabinet is not normally FTTC enabled. Time to look for properties closer to the cabinet and see if they have FTTC listed. For those with very long cabinet to premises distances the FTTC option is sometimes missing.

Most likely just a case that this cabinet was not enabled when others on the exchange were not enabled.

Also you say 2 km from the exchange building, the estimates suggest more like 5 to 6km. Or did you mean 2km from the green street cabinet.

My mistake on 2km. I meant to say 2 miles.

If you were to drive from the house to the exchange it's exactly 2 miles. (According to Google maps).

Here is a screenshot of the map.

http://i.imgur.com/HsLXplc.png

Time to look for properties closer to the cabinet and see if they have FTTC listed. For those with very long cabinet to premises distances the FTTC option is sometimes missing.

I looked at the street prior to the street I'm moving to, and they do have FTTC.

Later stated to be correct, but where did you get it from? I take your question mark to mean you thought I should have seen it somewhere .

http://maps.thinkbroadband.com/#!lat=50.492008165407...

Speeds in town look fttc like okay and other properties on that road are not showing FTTC

Sladnor Park Road (just to the East) and on Cabinet 3 is not showing any FTTC presence. Which properties in that street have FTTC, possibly the ones close to the junction with Honey Lane might

Nice resource thanks.

I was looking at properties on teignmouth road, but actually that road is like 3 miles long, so that was a silly thing to do.
You are right, you have to go about 800meters towards the exchange before a cabinet has fibre.

I don't think I'll be seeing any improvement any time soon then.

Probabaly best to go down the bonding route I think once I move in. I might get a suprise and get 2Mbit on the line... who knows.

But I would like to at least boost this to something reasonable. I work from home and there are several other heavy internet users.

The cabinet is listed ALWAYS

Which checker gives this info?

If no cabinet shown (very rural Highland area) would that suggest that it's a direct line to the 20CN exchange (5-6 kilometres away including some cable on the seabed) with no cabinet in between?

In reference to www.speedtest.net/my-result/3083705237:

CARRIER 3/5 Stars
BT

D'oh!

This one

https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html

To fully qualify - the cabinet is always listed so long as the telephone line or full address is not served by an Exchange Only line.

So yes if as remote as you suggest the change of EO line is higher, but the BDUK projects and yours would be HIE are starting to address EO lines. Issue is whether you are so remote to be waiting some time to see improvements.

For the original poster in Cornwall, it may be that the Cornish project will get to you shortly so best to check via http://www.superfastcornwall.org/ site and check with them.

Issue is whether you are so remote to be waiting some time to see improvements.

Probably

Most of the West Coast has remote small communities dotted around with 20CN exchanges with anything from 50 - 200 subscribers, even some of the higher populated areas have only 1500 - 4500 subscribers, most of the exchanges with say 4000+ subscribers are 21CN with some LLU provision from Sky and/or TT. Those exchanges may get FTTC sometime next year.

You may get a lot more on the line, my bt avaialability checker is similar to yours...from 1 to 3 on ADSL 1....my line lenght is about 2 miles ... I sync at about 6400 kbps with throughput about 5.5 Mbps....it is all about internal wireing and managing your disconnects etc ,you need to know the attenuation (from the next door friend) and enter it here http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/calc/ to seehow the line is performing.
IAn

i looked at all options for bonding -- main options were sharedband (using their bespoke hardware), entanet (various resellers -- using a commercial type cisco router), and aaisp (using one of their firebrick routers). I also considered load balancing using a peplink router.

The best bang for buck was AAISP as

-- it was the only provider with no additional charge for performing the bonding (the rest were around 20 plus VAT pounds extra per month in addition to the broadband services).

-- AAISP also looked to me like the most robust type of bonding due to having a firebrick at both ends -- one at AAISP and one in my house.

-- AAISP will support and configure the hardware as well as provide the bonding and the broadband so less chance of getting caught out with technical issues between cisco or sharedband and your broadband provider

All solutions require an outlay of something between £500 and £1000 for the hardware for the bonding.

i pay for AAISPs "home 1" package on one line (i think 35 per month for 200gb per month) and then a nominal charge of 12 pounds for a broadband service on line 2. The data allowance from the "home 1" package on the first line is then shared across both lines which improves the efficiency of buying bandwidth compared to buying an individual data bundle for each line -- another benefit of the AAISP solution.

i also experimented with two talk talk backhaul lines and two BT backhaul lines (all through AAISP as no charge for migrating between backhaul providers) but i got better results on the bonding using two BT backhaul lines due to a more similar and constant sync speed between the two lines -- the TT backhaul were more variable between the lines which reduced the effectiveness of the bonding.

I get 30mbps down and 1.6mbps up with a ping of about 10ms through the bonded lines

regards

chris